Puritan Blister #38

Due to a summer of trouble, I was set to make this column a sequel to the suicide one I did back in 2005 (PB #10). I's just feeling extra finite, not in an I-need-help ideation way, but leisurely so, you know, like a cavalier malaise that lets you think, almost romantically, "Hmhm, I could just drift right on out of the world today." But because the beginnings of that column seemed too indulgent, I started filtering its energy into one about functional-jalopy relationships, the kind resulting from the cynical/protective lowering of expectations that can blossom as one ages.

My favorite of those odes to partnership resignation is Bob Dylan's "From A Buick 6", the one on which the speaker is just happy to have a "soulful mama," a "junkyard angel" who "walks like Bo Diddley." It was so funny, or so its nimbleness allowed me to misremember it as being. When I revisited the track in my morbid state of mind, I felt like a dunce for never picking up on its fatality: She's a "graveyard woman." The (suicidal?) speaker is "lost on the river bridge" and then "on the water's edge." She keeps the shotgun "loaded with lead." He needs a "steam shovel" to "keep away the dead." And of course there's the refrain, about how she'll put a blanket over him when he goes "down dyin'." She sounds more like an accomplice in his death wish than a life mate.

Then on June 2, Bo Diddley-- an artist whom I couldn't help but love, and who lived one town over from me-- died. That night, the Raconteurs opened with a patch from "Hey Bo Diddley" on Conan. The next day the Ian Curtis biopic Control arrived on DVD, which was one's first chance to see it if one lived a town over from Bo Diddley. Voila! My new column would be about dead legends! About how we fans process such passings/losses not just concretely (aw, no more product from that artist, despite the vast amount of other artists they inspired) but abstractly and personally, how much sort of vicarious, possibly intellectually indefensible emotion-dumping and projection happens, and how similar those transactions are to "mainstream" folks' populating their personal mythscapes via "connections" to Brett Favre, Princess Diana, Heath Ledger, Brooke Hogan, etc.

So, with multiple fractured ribs and something called costochondral separation, facing a lawsuit and a misdemeanor charge, with two dead cars, and practically no friends left, I went to Bo Diddley's funeral.

But you have no right to go to Bo Diddley's funeral, some remnant of my conscience uttered. You did not know him. I have been to strangers' funerals before, as part of a Sociology course called "Death, Dying, & Bereavement" that I took to help me get over my teenage death anxiety. We spent a day observing a funeral home as a business, sitting on the back rows while people streamed in and out and were serviced. The place was a McDonald's of grief. (Note: persons with family histories of depression and suicide might seek to nurture, rather than alleviate, their death anxiety, just as a buffer/prophylactic.)

But you are going to this funeral as an aesthetic pose, a gesture toward a larger gesture, my conscience replied, or to fill column inches for Pitchfork, to get money for tuna melts that you smuggle past your "vegetarianism." You even sickly enjoy the phrase, "Bo Diddley's funeral." Guilty as charged, but without conviction. Bo Diddley most certainly is an aesthetic: a character, a style, a beat, a tremolo setting, a pair of ginormous vocal inflections, a guitar design, a series of stage moves, a fashion sense, all of it invented by Otha Ellas Bates McDaniel. He was a trickster, from his costume through his customized/decorated axes, to his dozens-playing moniker (the performing name literally meant "nothing" in slang). But he was also this, like, manifest epicenter of American (and planetary) music, from his Baptist-hymn and classical beginnings through his blues, soul, rock, proto-surf, rumba-funk, dance, rockabilly, and eventual latter-day less-celebratable gospel/hip-hop (though I tend to most cherish his prom jams, slow-dance heartscrapers such as "What Do You Know About Love?"). He influenced and spurred almost everyone who is awesome, from the countless songs that used his blisteringly macho guitar-as-percussion innovation, to the myriad second-wave rappers who sampled him (Kwame, Schoolly D, Yo-Yo, De La Soul, Method Man, to cite just a handful). And his early, wholly self-referential singles, repeating his handle, practically spawned the self-branding overdone by so many commercial emcees today, from 50 Cent to (shudder) Soulja Boy.

Dude, he wrote that Dirty Dancing song, "Love Is Strange"! He was a hero to punks the Sex Pistols, the Fall, and the Clash! Hell, Dylan's aforementioned, namechecking "From A Buick 6" is just a slightly sped-up version of Diddley's "Do What I Say". I hear him everywhere on my indie-rock hard drive, in the Cramps, Pixies, the Raveonettes, the Gories/Dirtbombs, in the Violent Femmes' gonzo "Black Girls", and in the Chuck D breakdown of Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing". Cheech and Chong spoofed him (awfully)! His song about a lover who could only say "googlia moo" certainly fertilized the Dead Milkmen tune about the wife who could only say "dog-pussy"! "The Originator", indeed! His first band's name: The Hipsters. And yet, as of this typing, at just under 500,000 last.fm plays, he's garnered 20 million fewer laptop listens than (shudder) the Kooks. Piss off, conscience; I can go to this funeral in good faith. I "know" Diddley.

As I walked into the funeral, at the Showers Of Blessings Harvest Center, I was subject to one of the most vivid spectacles I've ever beheld: a huge, bouncing, berobed choir performing not some staid dirge, but "Hey Bo Diddley". These people weren't about to tell him goodbye. And they were letting rock and roll visit a church. (The band was guitarless, which seemed inappropriate/offensive at first, until the host graciously told us that "no one wants to...compete with Bo.")

The room was about half "white" (Jews, et al) and half black. (Sorry, those of us raised in South Carolina's cultural Center For The Development Of Non-Healing Wounds just have a useless, superficial awareness of these things.) The room also seemed to consist of half people who knew the real human in the casket on a community/dinner-table level, and another half of people who "knew" the musician, either via the industry or fanhood. Two flower arrangements were shaped like Diddley's iconic rectangular guitars. Others were from Tom Petty, George Thorogood, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Lying in state, Diddley looked amazing. As my "encounters" with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees go, I've been in big coliseums with Dylan, small clubs with the Ramones and David Byrne; I used to have the same literary agent as Carlos Santana, and my kid sister once picked up Johnny Cash for her job at Enterprise car rental. But now I was mere feet away from two legends: on the fourth row facing Diddley, and about half a pew from Eric Burdon of the Animals. I had plopped, with utmost impertinence and only four dollars in my bank account, into a center seat behind Bob Gruen, capturer of classic photos of Dylan, Bowie, the Stones, the Pistols, the Clash, and he took the John Lennon NYC shots, etc. Star-stricken, me.

Superintendent Designee Elder Karl Anderson (what titles!) opened the ceremony discussing Diddley's signature beat: "Whereas James Brown took it to the bridge...Bo Diddley rode it aallll the waaaay!" The performance was so manipulative and wonderful, with complementary crescendos of organ and drums. Thus I (and most folks around me) started bawling. But I knew that, as much as part of me was crying for the family members across the aisle, I was using a funeral's permissive context as an excuse to cry about other sorenesses. It reminded me of when my mom was in prison in the nineties, and during her 8-hour weekend passes, she'd ask me to ferry around another inmate whose relatives would never visit her. The woman's favorite thing to do on the outside was to go to high school football games, where she could just scream, and it was cathartic and legitimizing, because, as she put it, "Everybody around me was yelling; they just didn't know what I was yelling about!"

The tension among the non-Christian rock fans in the room was "palpable," as they say. Rejecting death, the program brochure called the funeral a "homegoing," which reminded me of dayjob coworkers who actually answer the phone "Heaven-o," to not risk a syllabic mention of hell. So nothing could have been classier than Brother Corey Harris' choice of reading from the Old Testament: Psalm 90:12 contains no magic stunts, or afterlife hoodoo, or phantasmal intervention, or separatist invective. It's just good counsel for mortals, the obvious and unprofound kind of which it is so hard to stay mindful: "So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom."

From that point on, every speaker had either a funny or transcendent story to tell about the garishness or generosity of Diddley (you can barely imagine how much I want to type the less formal "Bo" instead, by this point). His pal Roosevelt Hutchinson discussed cooking a pig underground with Diddley, and then let his talk become a registry of the mundane: they ate, they drank, they mucked around in the afternoon, they drove, they talked—and right when he realized that his story was barely a story, and that it bordered on boring, but that he may have honestly conveyed the ho-hum mechanics of time-bondededness, how unlegendary and banal faithful companionship can be, he broke down and said, "He was my friend," only he pronounced it in a beautiful, fighting-back-tears rush: "Hewsmfrn."

Faith Fusillo read a condolence/dedication letter from Bill Clinton. Shayna Lillie read (I'm sorry) a really bad "poem" titled "How Do You Say Goodbye To A Legend" that sent every non-Christian rocker, who by now had weathered hours of hymns and preaching, into a politeness-testing, seat-shifting sub-rage. "How do you say goodbye to a legend?" the longtime homeless eccentric beside me asked the air. "Umh, you fucking don't. And anyway, you fucking can't."

Diddley grandson Garry Mitchell spoke next, finely setting up a battle between God and rock that characterized the rest of the proceedings: "In the beginning, God created heaven and earth, and man in his image. In the beginning he created Ellas McDaniel, and in 1955, Ellas McDaniel created Bo Diddley." Then Diddley's brother, Reverend Kenneth Haynes, told of the first time he heard Diddley sing: it was "Doodlebug, doodlebug, doodlebug," when they were barely not toddlers. He went on to almost over-portray the schism between churchly "calling" and Diddley's secular destiny, chastising his brother for following his guitar, voice, and songwriting talent around the world. Haynes told of Diddley offering him half of his earnings if he would keep him company, only to congratulate himself by saying that he stayed behind for Jesus. (The guy beside me: "You fool. You idiot.") He told of confronting (i.e. jealously guilt-tripping?) Diddley about his rock lifestyle, to which he claimed Diddley (kickassily) responded, "I don't like what I'm doing out here. But God gave me this gift to feed my family, and I can't stop now."

Haynes got overcome by the exhaustion of driving in from Biloxi, and his tales of being trapped by Katrina softened his evangelical tug. In order to finish, he had to be dramatically propped up by his daughters. Trust me, it was Shakespearean and worthy of portraiture, this patriarch unable to mourn upright without the weeping human crutches he sired. Before Haynes left the proscenium, he acknowledged that, despite the worldly success, Diddley was a model of Christian charity. "He would have given me anything," he said, and then, when he was away from the mic, he mumbled "except his hat."

As Diddley's granddaughters delivered an interminable gospel coda, the relatives who looked the most hard-living stumbled out of the theater. I followed them outside and watched them smoke and complain about how the service was going. True, Diddley got religious in his later years (consult his apologist joint "My Jesus Ain't Prejudice"), but he was more complicated than the scripture-party inside conveyed. As an atheist still trying to exorcise the superstitions of my fundamentalist upbringing, I understand that when a Christian dies, it's a infinitesimal part of a larger narrative about the body of Christ, but I've been maddened at funerals for relatives that seemed hijacked by biblegeeks, during which no tribute was paid to the individual stinky humanity of, say, my peppermint- and monkey-toy-addicted fussbudget grandmother, because some preacher felt compelled to regurgitate his invitational join-us trip. I mean, come on, Diddley wrote "Pills", which seemed tailor-made for the New York Dolls, and his homemade guitars had mudflap stripper silhouettes on them. The picture that ran with Entertainment Weekly's obituary had filth written in the walls in the background about junebugs fucking spiders, and running through the jungle, holding one's dick and pissing in the wind. An acquaintance who lived next door to him told me about his dropping by to invite the acquaintance's gorgeous girlfriend over to film a video "in a prostitute outfit" about how women shouldn't be mistreated. They said his home studio was peppered with huge piles of dog poop.

Didn't these folks know that Jesus and Mary Chain recorded the blasphemous/worshipful "Bo Diddley Is Jesus"? I left the funeral, weirdly energized, after sobbing along for about three hours, during the whiteface "Mime Ministry" of Boy Of Silence. I am not kidding. It was the coolest and most heartbreaking thing in the world, at that minute. When I got home, I checked out iTunes' special Bo Diddley section, and thought righteously of Morrissey's lyric from "Paint A Vulgar Picture" about the greed of profiteers when talent expires: "On their hands a dead star!"

The next night I went to see Vampire Weekend at St. Augustine Beach. Something about a band of Ferris Buellers flirting with afrobeat made me feel even more acutely caucasian than the Diddley ceremony, especially when Ezra Koenig baited the crowd about the East African origins of his opening band's name: "Do you all even know what a Harlem shake is?" I walked out to the ocean's edge and tried not to think depressing shit. My inner jukebox played Don Gibson's "Sea of Heartbreak" on repeat. I thought about the linguistic similarities shared by ammunition and sand: powder, shells, etc. Then the most retarded, reverent sentence popped into my mind, and I was okay: "What would Bo Diddley's funeral do?"